Feedmaker: URL + CSS selectors = RSS feed
67 points
4 hours ago
| 6 comments
| feedmaker.fly.dev
| HN
kschaul
2 hours ago
[-]
Glad you’re find the tool interesting! A short blog post behind it: https://kschaul.com/post/2023/04/16/feedmaker-quickly-genera...

And the GitHub url (hopefully easy to host your own instance): https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker

reply
mustaphah
1 hour ago
[-]
Looks like you're hosting this on fly.io - PAYG model. You could probably host this for free on Cloudflare Workers; 100k requests/day on the free tier; static content (the homepage) is free & unlimited.

Edit: The catch is the 10ms CPU cap per request - you'd need a super lean implementation. Django's too heavy for that.

reply
mustaphah
46 minutes ago
[-]
Well, someone already did with JS: https://github.com/ProfessorManhattan/rss-worker
reply
0cf8612b2e1e
1 hour ago
[-]
Python alone is many milliseconds to start. Unless they give you some allowances for interpreter overhead.
reply
mustaphah
3 hours ago
[-]
The good news: made it to the front page.

The bad news: so did the 503 page.

reply
benbristow
2 hours ago
[-]
In some ways a good thing, no? Shows you've got work to do on optimisation for large audiences. A free stress test (unless you're on a host that charges per hit or bandwidth excess), as you will.

Did load eventually for me, thought it was broken as no styles but looks like it's intentional.

reply
uyzstvqs
2 hours ago
[-]
Seems to be hosted using fly.io
reply
bradbeattie
2 hours ago
[-]
https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge is what I've been using for the same purpose.
reply
crazygringo
2 hours ago
[-]
I love this.

Has anyone tested to see if it works with Blogtrottr which will email you whenever there's a new item in an RSS feed?

Just since this doesn't seem like it even includes a date field in the RSS? And of course no guid. So I'm wondering how compatible it winds up being.

reply
kevincox
1 hour ago
[-]
Dates shouldn't matter. The feed has ID elements which is what identify entries. Atom has no guid element. So I would expect this to work with any reader.
reply
int0x29
2 hours ago
[-]
I made a CGI program that ran CSS selectors against URLs and returned the output. I debated making it public and then realized I probably didn't want to run an open proxy. I'm curious how long this will last.
reply
zekenie
2 hours ago
[-]
Not the same but this gives me an idea… what if there was a map reduce for doms as a web primitive. Like imagine if I could make a dom (or feed) that was some selection and transformation of another dom
reply
onedognight
2 hours ago
[-]
You have just re-invented XLST.
reply
1-more
2 hours ago
[-]
reply